Author: Teel

Words pass into my head as a matter of course, and some are endowed with intensity and force, but today the words that have caused me the most grief have floated my way on the winds like light, dead leafs. They caught up in the works of my body, twisting themselves where they didn’t belong, and I have been tightening like a network of old, rusty springs- and there is acid to them, and I am wearing down. An ancient automaton of the world before computers and robots and before anyone thought to build something to intentionally wear out, but where things simply wore out as a matter of the delicacy of matter. Built from hardened steel and carefully measured springs and sprockets and designed to do one thing perfectly again and again and again until one part wears down to dust and the whole machine just stops. I have not yet come to that final day where my parts no longer fit together and my springs break free, break down, but I can feel the peices inside me wearing down with friction where no two parts were meant to rub together, and I can sense that this is one wind-up-toy that has gone too long without the needed attention and maintanence – without someone reaching inside me and winding me up. I have not been treated with the same care and respect I see endowed upon the antiques and collectibles I sell, yet I feel as though I am more worn out than even some of the parts that have become so old and rusty they are no longer identifiable – people still love them and take them home to be cherished, 100 years after they have run out of usefullness. Perhaps I am of that newer breed of machine, built to fall apart a year and a day from the day it is born, built to be mistreated and misused and thrown away and replaced by something better and newer and younger and forgotten. A relic of a time gone by, but not old – merely designed to be forgotten, a relic of last week. ‘If only…’ and ‘if only…’ and ‘if only…’ I had been different, the world would not be as it is. These gentle words falling on open ears, these words designed to coerce regret and despair and pain. Yes, pain. And I wish I had the strength to resist their gentle tugs on my heartstrings, to go on as I was – as myself – without consideration for impossible nothings. Without spending too long on thoughts of what might have been, or what ‘ought to’ have been, and moving forward to what can be and what I’d like to see.

Okay, this is starting to turn up and away from the exhaustion and tension and resentment and pain that it was supposed to be about – it must be time to go write on something else.

Teel: 1
Cars: 0

Or is it the other way around? I don’t think I had any intention of killing the car. I got over halfway to my destination and through most of the ‘city driving’ that is the most difficult for me, and I even did it with the manual transmission in my sister’s Nissan Sentra. Then I killed it. I will not go into detail about what went wrong until after my dad has had a chance to take a look under the hood tomorrow, but it won’t even turn over, and it was smoking and smelled pretty bad. I’ll let you know how much I have to pay to get it fixed when I know more.

So, errr… we were almost an hour out when it broke, then we waited almost four hours for my dad to arrive (which was very reasonable, he had to finish getting to Pine, unload the truck he was driving ahead of us, do some wiring on and hook up the huge trailer, drive back down the hill with the trailer to the next turnaround, then back up to us), we worked for almost an hour to get the car onto the trailer, then carefully towed the car back home, for a total of nearly seven and a half hours on the road to end up back where we started minus one car. What a day!

So, I’m going to go to bed soon, but I’ll be ‘in town’ all day Thursday at the least, and probably be driven home Friday, depending on how things go. At the longest, my grandfather is coming back down Tuesday to see his doctor, and I can ride back with him then. I don’t know. I should really be working the store this weekend. Someone should be, anyway. With two more new renters opening this weekend & the weather warming up, we’re sure to get a lot of traffic through. Traffic with money. We always hope they’ll leave some.

I was going to work on re-arranging things so I could work on creating new paintings while running the store while I was in there this weekend. That would be nice, and might help spur sales. If they start selling much at all, I’m going to have to be painting at a pretty good clip to keep up with them. High hopes. I’ve got high hopes. Of course, I had hopes of being able to drive all the way to Pine today, and with a manual transmission, no less. You know how THAT went. I guess I should have set my goals lower, gone with the automatic, probably wouldn’t have killed it. Oh well.

Confidence. I must have confidence. I thought I was doing pretty well as far as the driving went … a little trouble teaching my feet the right measure of pressure to push down the gas and let up the clutch to get started from a standstill, but I didn’t stall it out but once or twice, and apparently I had ‘really smooth transitions’ between gears – this from my sister who was riding along and now probably isn’t so happy she let me drive her car. (* I’m sorry, Angela! *) Anyway, I have confidence my art will sell. I have got some ideas about how to rewrite Forlorn so that when I get it going through Cafepress you’ll want to buy a copy – it won’t be what you’ve read so far, a more complete whole. It may even have a plot, conflict, climax, and who knows? Even an end?

Still, I ought to be sleeping now. I will be soon. I hope. Perchance to dream the death of cars.

So, I managed to buy a used copy of The Ring on DVD yesterday or so, and then before I could take it up to Pine and watch it all by my lonesome in a dark room, my sister insisted that we watch it tonight. I reminded her that it was late and she needed to be able to get up to go to work in the morning, but we watched it anyway.

It was still scary. I still have the feeling something is out to get me. Like there’s something right behind me, or just past my edge of vision in the dark, waiting to scare me to death. I keep turning my head to see, and there keeps not being anything there. I probably won’t feel totally alright until I get home to Pine and make a copy of the DVD. Which, I suppose, doesn’t mean a lot if you didn’t watch (or didn’t understand) the movie. But I tell you what; before I go to bed tomorrow night (tonight, really, I guess, it’s so darn late) there will be a good DVD copy of The Ring, made by my hands. I’m thinking of slipping it into one of the four or five DVDs’ cases in the collection at my local library in Pine the next time I go in. Or convincing someone at Zia to slip it into someone’s bag as a ‘freebie’. I don’t know. I need to make a copy, and to get it out of my hands.

Grr… Yeah. So, it was still scary. I happened to watch it with the only other person in this household who also thought it was scary, which I’m sure didn’t help make it any easier on me. But I have been studying how to write good screenplays, and I’ve been practicing watching movies with an eye for direction and cinematography, and I was able through most of the movie to pay attention to the fact that it was a movie, to distract myself by thinking about what sort of cameras and lenses they might be using and why certain shots were set up the way they were instead of other ways… But there are a few scenese that are just hard to do that with.

I think I’m going to copy the movie in some other ways, too. I think I’m going to catch some stillframes from it and integrate them into a painting of some kind. Something that will probably end up pretty creepy. Which reminds me, I was over at Zoe’s house tonight and at one point we were discussing my art, and how he really likes my new stuff, the way it’s been progressing, but doesn’t know where he’d hang it in his own home… Sort of saying it didn’t go with his style, which is fine, but then he suggested that he’d hang it in the bedroom, but it would probably scare his wife. Keep her up at nights. Some of my stuff, that’s true. I have one … there’s this pleading pair of eyes… some people say they just look scared, but I tell you they scared a woman out of the store on Sunday. She would glance up at them and then turn her head quickly away… she practically ran out of the store. I bet his wife would like a painting like ‘her embrace’ … something about passion and love.

Oh well. I’m going to see if my eyes will close. I haven’t tried yet. There’s a light on in the room I’m supposed to be sleeping in, and … well… I may just not turn it out. I’ll let you know.

This is the 600th post on FYTH. I was gonna title it something like ‘I’m tired’ or ‘so tired…’ but I figure that in 600 posts I’ve used that title quite a few times. It’s late, I’ve had a long day, and I have another long, hard day ahead of me. All day tomorrow (that is, today, it’s so late) I’ll be working with my father to hang sheetrock for a new ceiling in two rooms. No, we don’t have any of those fancy devices they make for holding the sheetrock up while it gets screwed in place. Yes, our ceiling is at a fair angle, making holding it in the right place more difficult. Yes, it is just the two of us for most of the day (eventually my younger brother will get home from school and may help, but who know how much help he’ll be, or how far along we’ll be.

Oh, except that since we’re all leaving in the morning Wednesday morning, the whole thing has to be done, and done right, by the end of tomorrow. Which is fine. He and I have done this before, on the other side of this house, in a much bigger, less regular, equally slanted ceiling. Not in one day, but … if I think back 7 or 8 years… I think I can remember … anyway, so that’ll be a long, hard day, then I think everyone’s going to go out and we’re all going to see The Core. You know, if we have the energy to sit still in a dark room for two hours. Oh, and did I mention that on Wednesday, when we all crawl back up the hill, we’ll be taking three vehicles, one of them piloted by me? This is your warning to stay off the roads in the direction of Pine from where I’m at (around 32nd Street and Bell) to the best of your ability on Wednesday. Wish me luck.

Where was I? Oh yeah, I was going to explain why I was still up! I was waiting for my email to finish downloading, because I was expecting one that wasn’t there, and because I was … well … there’s a website I was supposed to do something at Sunday that I thought I did, but didn’t, and had to do tonight instead. And when I switched from high speed to dial-up, I switched from leaving a month’s worth of email on my mail server to leaving 7 days worth. And I stopped checking mail on my laptop, because .. .well, it seemed redundant to check the same mail on two computers with dial-up. So, I brought my laptop with me to phoenix, so I can check my mail, and for another reason, and I told it to download mail, and man but I love junk mail, which made my download take so long I had time to go do the thing at the website AND write this entry. But it’s done now, so I’m going to bed.

So, we were out shopping today, I think my dad was looking for some of those big plastic Sterilite tubs for storing stuff in, and I forgot to bring my toothbrush down, so I was looking for a toothbrush, and we stopped at a local SuperKMart that’s having a big closing sale: Everything 30%-80% off. So we browsed around the whole store anyway, to see if they had any deals we couldn’t pass up. Their regular DVD prices were so high that the 30% discount didn’t bring them even down to the regular prices I pay for used DVDs, so I basically walked right by those. Then 30% off the XBox games wasn’t very good either, and they didn’t have anything I wanted anyway. Except there was a Gamecube still in their display case. 30% off a $149.99 Gamecube is $105, which is a fantastic deal you can’t get anywhere else. I had been thinking (before I lost my job, when they dropped the GC’s price to $150) of getting one anyway, or going halfs with Angela on one, like we did the XBox. So Angela and I discussed it a little and had the woman working there pull it out for us before anyone else noticed it. I know, I know, I don’t have any secure form of income, but I just hung my art in Pine and already there’s a lot of interest. I’ve seen what’s selling at other local galleries and am very confident that mine will sell. And since room and board is all covered by my grandparents right now, any product I sell is just butter. So… Yeah, we got it. There was quite a mit of trouble, confusion, and waiting, involving four or five KMart employees to try to figure out how to ring us up, and the wait irritated my dad a little, since they didn’t have the containers he had been looking for and wanted to get back on track, but for $50 off, it was certainly worth my time.

I’m going to leave it here in Phoenix for now, let Angela enjoy it like she does the XBox… keep my eyes out for good prices on the several Gamecube games I’m interested in at Zia and online, and Angela will do the same and probably rent some at Blockbuster. I’m content with her having it and renting games for right now, I have plenty to do in Pine, and in May I’ll be taking back the XBox when I buy Enter the Matrix… Probably I’ll find a Gamecube game or two between now and when I finish Enter the Matrix, and I’ll trade the XBox for the Gamecube after that. We’ll see. It’s something I wanted, anyway, and an amazing price, even if I don’t take it home right away. Moo!